Tag Archives: cats

We have friends visiting this weekend, which means that since our house is always tidy and clean, we can just relax and wait for them to arrive in the pristine surroundings of our lovely house.

Or, it means we spend a week frantically tidying, cleaning and washing.

You choose.

Looking forward to spending some time with them both, I should think we’ll mainly stay in and eat and drink, they’re only here overnight. It gave us a good excuse to have a solid go at the computer room (mentioned yesterday). We’ve moved a load of crap off the shelving unit in the room, made space for all my freshly unpacked painting gear (takes up a surprising amount of space), left some room for Grete to store some stuff, thrown away more computer stuff, moved Grete’s spare monitor so she has more desk space, and generally made the place a lot less cramped.

It probably won’t last but it looks pretty good for the time being.

Working and tidying has meant I’ve not had much time to get into any painting and of course I won’t be doing any over the weekend, but I’m sure I’ll get back to it next week. Clocks go back on Sunday morning, gives us another hour in bed (or more likely, another hour awake), but it messes with the internal clocks on the cats. Instead of being hungry at 8am/6pm they’ll be hungry at 7am/5pm and instead of being annoying and waking us up at 5 or 6am to go out, they’ll be trying to do that at 4 or 5am. Usually takes them about a month to get switched over but for that month it’s hell between 5pm and 6pm trying to explain to them that they need to wait for a bit to eat.

I mentioned that to a friend and she commented on her young kids, it hadn’t really dawned on me that kids would pose the same problem on a larger scale, especially when they’re young. You just get them used to getting up and going to bed at a certain time and then the next day, it’s all an hour out. Must be annoying for parents and the kids.

Of course, diabetes doesn’t care about daylight savings either, so for the first few days I have to sort of slowly move my meal times.

We’ve just shipped Bubbles off to the vets again, hopefully to have her staples removed and hopefully the last visit for a little while. As soon as we started shutting doors upstairs she knew something was up, and starting pacing and hiding. However, it was still less stressful than it used to be, she sort of skulks around but doesn’t have anywhere to run.

In case you wondered, if you put a cat box standing up on it’s end, so the door is at the top, you can carefully lower the cat in, arse first, which is a hell of a lot easier than trying to stuff them in head first (at which point they turn into a cat with a thousand front paws).

Last week was really stressful, but the weekend was relaxing and really enjoyable so it all worked out. We’d been planning to go to Brighton for quite a while, some friends in Everquest were having a guild meet (The Blue Dragons) and we’d said we would be going along. It’s easy for us in Brighton because we can stay with Grete’s family down there, and the only pressure at the time was whether the Mondeo would make the journey or not. We sorted out the Mondeo issue by replacing the car, so we were happy the Megane would be fine.

And then last Sunday it all went to pot! Grete’s step dad wasn’t well so we couldn’t stay with them, and we had a frantic two hours checking the web and making calls to try and book a hotel. Needless to say, it’s not easy to get a hotel room in Brighton, in Summer, with only 4 or 5 days notice, and it’s virtually impossible to get somewhere at the budget end of the market. So we sucked it up and decided to just make a holiday of it, celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary a week late. We booked into the Queens Hotel, which is right on the sea front and pier in Brighton. We knew car parking would be a nightmare, but there’s one right next to the hotel (The Lanes) which was £15 for 24 hours (map here). Sounds a lot, but in Brighton it’s not so bad, and we knew we wouldn’t be needing to move the car once we parked up.

So we had the hotel booked, and we were getting more excited. We had a friend lined up to pop in and visit the cats on Saturday, they’re fine for 3 days / 2 nights on their own, but it’s nice if someone can pop in and check on them. Then of course, Bubbles had her ‘incident‘, so now with only 2 days to go we’re faced with having to give her antibiotics and really needing someone to check her every day to make sure she’s ok and her staples are in good condition. The vet we take her too recommended someone who can visit to feed cats while you’re away, and we managed to get in touch with her and she visited on Thursday, we got a key cut, and we were set. Of course, we also had to get Bubbles into the vets on Friday morning for a checkup (8am) so our weekend started at around 6:30am.

Bubbles was fine, Grete was back at 8:30am, I spent the last hour finishing up the packing and sorting out litter trays, food and water for the cats while she was out. We set off, the sun was bright, not a cloud in the sky. Quick stop at Tesco to pick up bottled water and have a solid breakfast, and we were on the M1 before 10am. Traffic to Brighton was as to be expected, M25 was slow, A23 was really bad into Brighton itself, and we finally got to the Lanes car park at around 3:00pm.

Checked in, flaked out!

But we hadn’t spent all that money so that we could sit in a too-hot hotel room, so we showered and headed out onto the sea front. The weather forecasts had all said it would be showery and overcast, but on the Friday it was steaming hot, blue skies and 28 degrees. We had a walk up and down the pier, and then met up with some friends and walked around a bit again, had some drinks and generally relaxed. Fish and chips on the pier was excellent. We managed to get some sleep on Friday night despite the heat, and were up bright and early for our cooked breakfast!

Saturday morning was spent wandering the Lanes in Brighton with our friends, before finally meeting up with the other Everquest players at the Clock Tower. From there we headed over to Donatellos for some excellent pizza, then some beers (in the Druid’s Head), then some wandering around and a visit to the pier, and more beer, and more food, and finally a few of us settled in Horatio’s and listened to some live music while the rest went in search of more quiet beer.

As we were leaving the pier, I’d had a couple of drinks, we passed a hen party leaving as well. A woman dressed as a nurse, in a short white rubber dress, a few others in various stages of fancy dress, and a woman who was clearly dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, complete with basket and red hood. As I was passing, I said ‘my, what big ears you have’ and she gave me a stare of death! She looked very confused, you’d think that if you’re going to dress up as a sexy little red riding hood you’d at least read the source material on which your costume is based, but apparently not. Anyway, it was only a few moments later when we realised if she hasn’t read the story she’s going to be going to bed worrying that she has big ears and some ugly oaf on the pier insulted her.

Sunday morning meant more cooked breakfast!! A quick exit from the hotel, moving the car to another car park near to the China Garden (superb Dim Sum place in Brighton, I can recommend them), and then some paddling on the beach! No offense to people from Brighton, but you really need to get the government to import some sand. You can not go paddling when the beach is covered in pebbles without getting hurt. We wore some crocs but the rocks just collected in them. Anyway the water was fantastically cool, the beach was great, the sun was hot (I got burned, yeh I know, but I didn’t think we’d be out long enough). We wandered around Brighton a bit, and then met up with friends for Dim Sum, which was excellent as always.

Finally we headed out, did the family rounds (meeting up with Grete’s folks) and headed home. Got back here around midnight on the Sunday. Bubbles is fine, but grouchy. We’re knackered, but had a fantastic time.

So, she took up her favourite position (on the floor, near her scratching post, on her back) again, and nodded off. So I took some photo’s, look away now if you’re squeamish. By the way, there’s a reason we took these, not just because this is the Internet Age of Blogging Injuries, but because if we have some photo’s, we can look closely at the wound without having to hold her down, and we can check how it is in a week or so. Don’t have to get anywhere near as close to her with the camera so she stays relaxed.

Not that she appears to care about her injuries at all anyway.

So, here she is, dozing. She often nods off with her legs up in the air like that and the injury (which you can see in the shaved patch) doesn’t appear to be changing her approach.

The nurse shaved around the wound last night when we took her in to the emergency vets so the vet could get a better look.

She just let us hold her sitting up while the nurse used electric clippers to shave the area, she seemed totally calm and never displayed any signs that the wound was causing her pain.

Here’s the close up of the wound, looks like 6 staples and it’s looking a lot angrier than it did first thing this morning.

You can click the pictures for full size versions if you dare.

I bet she’ll be showing this scar off to her buddies once it’s healed.

I wonder if she knows how damn luck she was, another 1 or 2mm and it may have been a totally different story 🙁

We’ve had a good look around the garden and can’t see anything specifically hazardous that could have caused it, and her snap-away collar is missing and not anywhere in the garden, so we’re non-the-wiser about where she picked the injury up.

They’ve put 3 metal staples into Bubbles’ wound, Grete insists on calling her Frankencat, I’m still partial to calling her Stupid. Other than being pissed off at not being allowed out of the house, she seems in really good spirits, oblivious to the stress she’s causing with regards to our weekend away.

We think we’ve got a solution, a vet recommended cat sitter, who is actually a nurse who used to work at the vets and who looked after Squeak when she was in for diabetic treatment a few times. She’s coming around tomorrow to meet the cats, and assuming everything is fine she’ll be popping in over the weekend so we can still go away.

I’ll try and get a photo of the staples, the wound was really impressive but despite lying on her back plenty of times last night and this morning she wouldn’t stay still while I got the camera. I got a shot of her (again, lying on her back involuntarily) earlier but not sure if you can see the staples or not.

So we got to bed at around 3:30am and we were either both up or awake from about 6:30am because Bubbles doesn’t understand why she can’t go out and can’t eat.

Grete’s got a vet’s appointment at 9:10am so we just had the ‘fun’ of getting Bubbles back into the cat box and out of the house. She’s been walking around the house all morning, on me, on the sofa, in the lounge. Suddenly, she just runs upstairs and hides. We haven’t even got the cat box out of the outhouse. She just knows. She hid under the bed so I got to be Evil and dragged her out.

Hopefully it’ll be fast and they don’t have to keep her in.

Not sure about our plans for the weekend now either, if we need to be in and keeping an eye on her 🙁

So we just got back from the vets (2:20am). Bubbles has scrapped/sliced the skin of her stomach but somehow managed to not go through the first layer of fat. There’s a bit of blood but nothing hugely serious. Vet gave her some jabs and advised us to maybe get a stitch put in tomorrow at our regular vets. She came in as usual at around 11:30pm, seemed fine and happy, was playing in the sitting room. Grete spotted a scratch on her nose but she gets those from time to time, then she rolled over quite happily to play with the toy and we noticed her stomach wound.

Cats have bad timing, that’s £215, plus whatever tomorrow is, on top of around £300 we weren’t expecting to be paying out this weekend (for other stuff). Ah well, she’s covered by insurance thankfully so we’ll get some of it back, and there’s no way I’d hold off getting either of them medical assistance just because of the money. But, her timing does suck.

… and, Cats. Ours decided to get us up at 6am this morning. Obviously it was incredibly important that she was outside. So, I was in the office by 7:15am. Which of course means now I’m knackered.

When I was 17 this wouldn’t be an issue. Now it’ll take me like 5 weeks to get over one early start. This is her, playing in the mulch. Cute you might say, but try thinking that at 6am when she’s meowing in your ear non-stop for 20 minutes.

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In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be. - Hubert H. Humphrey.